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Comment by lmilcin | Hacker News Reader

What you misread is that the patent is awarded to Apple, not Swift. Apple is not being released under Apache 2 license and Apple is not restricted to using the patent only for Swift. If they decide tomorrow to have another language that is not being released under Apache 2 license then there is nothing stopping them from using this feature as the patent is already theirs.

Also, has anybody noticed that every single language in existence borrows features from some other language FOR FREE? If all languages started patenting their features then we soon will be completely boggled with lawsuits or unable to invent new, better languages as they will not be able to use already established convenient features.

There are only this many simple convenient ways to denote programming language features. There is limited number of single character operators and ways you can organize them. Granting patents to single characters is just stupid.

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Exactly! Apache 2 may protect users of Swift from suits for use of Swift itself, but it does not protect everyone else from suits for use of the concept elsewhere.

Including from suits from Apple itself for using concepts of Swift elsewhere in projects that were developed from scratch, not forked from Apple's projects, right?

Yes, that is my understanding.

> What you misread is that the patent is awarded to Apple, not Swift. Apple is not being released under Apache 2 license and Apple is not restricted to using the patent only for Swift. If they decide tomorrow to have another language that is not being released under Apache 2 license then there is nothing stopping them from using this feature as the patent is already theirs.

This is wrong. The license says:

>3. Grant of Patent License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work, where such license applies only to those patent claims licensable by such Contributor that are necessarily infringed by their Contribution(s) alone or by combination of their Contribution(s) with the Work to which such Contribution(s) was submitted.

'Each Contributor heareby grants to you, ... licence ... to use ... the Work ....'

However, I am very much not a lawyer. Like Chris, I do talk to IP lawyers as part of my work.

The license is irrelevant. Apple doesn't need a license because it owns the patent. Also, the license that Apple grants to others to use its invention doesn't take away any of its own rights to the patented invention.

The issue is you cannot make a language that uses the feature. It doesn't matter if you are user of Swift or not. The license only grants you the ability to use the patented feature as long as you are using it as part of the licensed software.

patenting syntax might fall in the same box as patenting number sequences

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